In U.S. as a foreigner you pay the same taxes as everybody and you also don't get all of the services. I don't believe taxes should be a-la-carte. They should just be more fair.

The US doing silly things doesn't mean we need to measure other countries by that yard stick.

'Fair' by itself is a pretty meaningless term.

A simple example:

Assume for the sake of argument, that we agree that all else being equal that people without kids should pay higher taxes than people with kids.

Now, progressive income tax systems are fairly common and often seen as fair. So it might make sense and be fair, to make rich childless people without kids pay a bigger penalty for that choice than poorer people.

So far so boring.

But let's flip our perspective now:

Take the childless case as the baseline and instead talk in terms of getting tax allowance for having kids.

Now we can argue that rich people shouldn't get a bigger tax allowance for having kids. That wouldn't be fair! At most they should get the same tax allowance as poor people, or perhaps even a smaller one.

If you step back a bit, you see that talking about a tax allowance or a tax penalty are just two faces of the same coin depending on what you see as the baseline.

Just talking about some nebulous fairness let's you argue for either approach.

So you need to supply some extra information to actually make a decision.

But many things are less expensive, health, education...

Which most people don’t need in their earning prime

That's right, people don't need health care for themselves, or their kids, or their parents, in their earning prime. Neither do they need to pay educational expenses like private school or college.

Wait a sec, actually, people famously need to pay for all those things in their earning prime! What was I thinking?

I think he was talking about a single person with no kids.